On writing The Daily Lioness for Karen

Nearly every day since September 4th, I have posted a photograph of lionesses found on the Internet together with a small commentary to try to inspire my dear sister-in-law Karen to keep putting one foot in front of the other after the death of her husband, my brother Richard. I feel that the run of thoughts on this idea is near its end, but the doing of it has been unexpectedly inspirational to me as well as, I dearly hope, helpful for her.

To post anything every day on her Facebook page is a significant commitment of time and energy. The death of my brother Richard was my first experience of such a public, immediate, and intimate event in digital media, so that by itself has been a learning experience. In this initiation with Richard I found Facebook to be a friend, though I can easily see that it could not be too.

On the first day, September 4th, knowing her love of animals and cats in particular, I found an image of a lioness in the ether and put it on her page, with a message:

          Here is a Lioness to give you strength and courage today.

That day I thought about the idea of a lioness in Africa, and the hardships of that life, and began to see correlations between a lion’s hard life, and the reality of grief, and to the necessity to continue to live in spite of terrible things happening. Karen and I share the conviction that animals feel what we do, even if differently to the human experience, so this was a means to connect on many levels.

As the series continued and became The Daily Lioness for Karen, I thought about the horror and challenge of extreme grief – draining, filled with horrifying recollections, lonely, and ultimately tedious in the endless loop of sadness. This seemed so real for a lioness too, based on the many nature films I watched (and ones I sought out during this process as I continued to evolve my thoughts about this matter). A lioness has many burdens; she is the breadwinner of the family, she must work collaboratively with her fellow females. Despite all the events of a day, she must still get up and move effectively the next day.

The analogy to Karen’s life was striking. Karen has several very close female friends, and so I began to imagine them as the fellow lionesses of the pride. Lionesses in the wild are very affectionate with their fellow females, and they are well-photographed and represented on the Web. I found that I could pull down photos of these beautiful animals to illustrate my thoughts for her, which allowed me to delve into this important relationship and love between females that is so obviously critical to lion kind, as well as to Karen as she wended her way through the terrible months after Richard died.

Themes emerged. “Life on the plains” for me began to have very deep and significant meaning – the ongoing, huge, inevitability of events that shape our days and our lives. I used this phrase often. The notion that deep sorrow was not knowable to anyone else, captured inside a being and experienced personally and alone, pervades many of the entries.

          The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.
                                                                                      Proverbs 14:10 (King James)

During this period I watched a documentary where a lioness had two lovely little cubs, which were her firstborn, so she was inexperienced. She moved their nest as instinct dictated, but in a move when the cubs were at their sweetest and most innocent they stopped and accidentally made their home near the nest of a cobra snake. The snake was very aggressive and bit all three of them, killing the cubs and desperately wounding the mother lion. She was not able to do anything for days, delirious with poison and pain and dehydration. Somehow she survived, and the moment she could, she came back to where her cubs had been. Of course the hyenas had long since taken away their little bodies as Nature designs, and the mother lion looked and looked, but they were not there. Lions do not cry; they have a different experience to humans in these matters. But there is no doubt that she was desperately disturbed and upset. But every day on the plains, the sun comes up, the heat begins, and the belly roars for food. There is no time for standing still to mourn . . . the lioness had to get up and move on, with only a moment to look back to the babies that she loved, and from that point on, her sorrow only lived within her.

This became profoundly significant for me in considering Karen’s grief.

I found inspiration in many things during this time. The photographs of the lionesses themselves gave inspiration – admittedly not always channeling what the lioness might be actually experiencing: inevitably anthropomorphized to meet the imperative of the Daily Lioness. So a photo of two lionesses in a wild leap (heaven only knows why!) was attached to this entry:

Each day life on the plains presents the highly unexpected, which must be met with balance and equanimity. Or something relatively close. If possible.

I tried to have a humorous touch when I could – but thematically I returned over and over to these core ideas:

·        Life on the plains > our (and Karen’s) everyday life, which is has random terrible events, is relentless and unsympathetic, but Karen must still get up every day and go to work

·        The other Lionesses > Karen’s female friends who have been so good for her (many blessings on you Lionesses)

·        The complete isolation of the Lioness > Karen’s unknowable grief

·        The tedium of the Lioness’ life > I sense that endless grief is tedious, is boring, is exhausting, and is inescapable; robbing Karen of the will to do or try anything but still astonishing her by the tedious boredom of the pain

·        The paradox of finding moments of joy in long periods of grief > I know Karen experienced this, even when we were there with her, and it is probably hard to reconcile spiritually but this is what leads the way out of the tunnel of grief

·        The emergence from grief into a new and deeper consciousness > a process I know she is experiencing now

·        The bravery of living on in the face of the death of those closest to us – as well as the inevitability of it > Karen’s daily challenge

·        The acceptance of sorrow as a way of life > not a happy thing, but Karen’s way of life now

·        The loneliness of grief > as noted in the Proverb above, simply the way it is for Karen and anyone who is afflicted with terrible loss

And ultimately, that salvation and relief comes from the normal and everyday things; standing up each day, doing what must be done; facing life on the plains is the way out of the terrible state of grief, if only by the reality that day by day, it becomes further behind and a new life evolves.

Karen has been wonderfully thoughtful and philosophical during the process of Richard’s dying, death and aftermath, and as she herself has said, has sought understanding in reading the experiences and wisdom of others. She puts excerpts on her Facebook page from time to time and these have given me ideas as well, and have informed the Daily Lioness to be directly relevant to her, and to the fine thoughts of others.

I did not shy away from facing the reality that Richard is gone, and that this is the root of the problem. I intuit that Karen does not want this forgotten, and I wrote about it several times. He is gone. We grieve. We try to manage our lives in the face of his loss. It is not fair, but it cannot be changed.

In the end, the simplicity of the statements in this series of thoughts has actually been filled with tremendous deeper meeting, certainly for me and I hope for Karen. I hope that having thought this all through now for her, it will help me should I ever need it. I don’t know; La Calavera has thought for years about death, but thinking about it is not the same as living it.

I love you Karen, and Pancho.